'Do you mean Bakhtiian has entrusted me to you?'
He rallied. 'Just for the afternoon, dear Sister. And we've got a long ride to camp. If we don't get there before dark, Bakhtiian will skin me and use my hide for a tent.''
'How revolting, Yuri. And what did the Chapalii think of all this?'
He shrugged, clearly not much interested in the Chapalii. 'Lord Ishii is as cold as a stone in winter. He's never the least bit afraid. But the younger one, Garii-he offered to Niko to help him tend the wounded.'
'Garii offered to help tend the wounded?'
Yuri nodded.
'And Ishii did not forbid it?'
'Why should he forbid it, Tess? If Garii has some knowledge of healing… Any man would do the same.'
'Any man,' Tess muttered under her breath, wondering what game Garii was playing now. 'Come on.' She took two steps down the slope, heading for the horses.
'What's wrong?' he asked when she paused.
'Wait.' She hesitated, turning back to regard the entrance to the overhang. With resolve, she crawled back inside where the blanket still lay. She brought it back out, shook it as Yuri stared, and rolled it up neatly. 'It's Fedya's blanket,' she said at last, when he still did not speak.
'He has a sister,' he said finally.
A sister who would mourn him. A sister who did not even know yet that he was dead. Tears filled her eyes, and she wiped at them impatiently, as if that would make them stop.
Yuri took her hand. 'Come, Tess,' he said softly. They went down together.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
'The best men choose one thing above all else: everlasting fame among mortal men.'
If they treated Tess more and more like one of their own, she scarcely noticed it because it seemed to flow naturally from her time among them. The ways of the jaran lay in her hands: she examined each one and let it settle within her until her strange hybrid of customs grew so complex and interwoven that, at odd moments, she forgot where one left off and the other began. The days removed her from Fedya's death; he became increasingly the inhabitant of a sequestered dream.
For months now she had become accustomed to the swell and flow of the plain, a grand monotony alleviated by hills and the occasional watercourse slicing through it. But the plains do not continue forever, just as happiness and sorrow both eventually come to an end. Their first hint of the highlands was a rough stretch of land pitted with gorges and rugged valleys that were barren of cover and composed of rock as stubborn and sharp and unyielding as a saint. The jaran playfully called it krinye-tom, the little mountains; Tess called it hell and wondered what the big mountains were like.
They slowed their pace to a crawl and ranged wide to find enough fodder for the horses. The dirt clung to Tess. The heat baked the walls of hard stone, and sweat plastered her shirt to her back. The men veiled their heads in cloth to protect themselves from the sun. Tess's scalp itched, but she did not dare undo her braided hair, having no water to wash it in. The horses got the greatest share of the water. Was there a point past which one could not become clean again?
She dreamed of showers. At least the others looked as filthy as she felt, and they joked about it constantly, liking it as little as she did. Only the Chapalii, who did not appear to sweat at all, appeared unaffected; Tess knew that this heat was doubtless a relief to them, being closer to their natural climate.
At long last, they came out onto the watershed of the mountains, grass and shrubs and a scattering of trees on level land. Not a lush land, by any means-that would be far far south, across the great range-but a breeze cooled her cheeks and her shirt dried. They came to an isolated khaja village, and Bakhtiian traded gold trinkets and two tarpans for grain.
Two days' ride out from the village, Bakhtiian called an entire day's halt when they came to a deep-bedded stream. Tess found a pool upstream from the horses, stripped, and washed herself and her hair-that twice-and every piece of clothing in her possession, for the dirt had contaminated even the saddlebags. Surely this stream of all streams was blessed by the gods, for the clearness of its water and the lazy trickle of its flow. She spread her damp blanket over a smooth-surfaced rock and, naked, stretched out on it to dry.
Pulling her mirror case free of her gear, she undid its clasps and slid the mirror out. Her face surprised her, she had not seen it in so long: the blunt chin, the high cheekbones, the deep green of her eyes. Not a bad face, after all, though the green eyes seemed out of place; she kept thinking they ought to be blue or brown. She had grown lean. Streaks of gold lightened her hair. Her hands were strong. She felt-content.
Except for Charles. Somewhere, Charles was worrying about her, searching for her. At least she was headed in the right direction. Yet at this moment, Jeds seemed like a goal too distant to agonize over. Turning over to let her back dry, she rested her chin on her laced fingers and stared at the rippling water. Light sparked off it, ever- changing, a constant, inexorable flux.
Her privacy was assured, a privilege, not a prison, conferred on her because she was female, and that was a thing she had never known on Earth, where locked doors bought privacy and privacy could be violated by crime or, for those unlucky enough to be related to the most influential human in the Chapalii Empire, by the media and the ubiquitous
Protocol Office. Only the most degraded of outcasts would assault her here and, as for the Chapalii, she outranked them. In this land, a person's fortune could be measured in sun and sweet wind and kinship with other people. Material possessions became, in the end, a burden; what you possessed of the spirit was far more valuable. Gloom was disdained: in a world of fighters it was a hindrance; to a people beside whom freedom ran like a hound, it was absurd.
Except for Fedya. But for Fedya, it had proved fatal. With a sigh, Tess sat up. She braided her hair, pinned the braid atop her head, and went swimming. The water felt cool and soft against her skin. The sun warmed her face. She did not go back to camp until evening.
In the morning she rode out with Bakhtiian. Ahead, dark stained the land, and she asked him what it was.
'Don-usbekh. The dark wood. Days of it, east and west, and south to the mountains. The khaja say it is haunted.' He smiled, looking at her to see what her reaction would be.
'Haunted by what?' she asked, not quite laughing.
He shrugged. 'The khaja fear many things, not least their own nightmares. I do not know.'
'Do you think it is haunted?'
'I think that no khaja will live there. But there's an old road that runs through it, so once people must not have feared it as they do now.'
An old road. 'Will we follow this old road?'
'It's the only track through. See there-that broken pillar. We'll follow the road from there.'
But despite her fears-or hopes-the old road proved to be just that-an old road. Ancient, stone paved, half grown over in spots, it looked exactly like what she guessed it must be: some relic from an old empire, thrown across the vast land.
'Perhaps the people who built this also built the great temple on the plains,' she said to Bakhtiian as they waited in the first outlying tendril of the forest for the jahar to catch up with them.
'Perhaps they did.'
She spotted the first ranks of the jahar in the distance, tiny figures moving closer. 'Bakhtiian, if Mikhailov's men could find you on the plain, aren't you worried that they might find you more easily on a road like this? We'll be trapped on it, on a single road surrounded by trees.'
'Mikhailov, whatever else he may be, is not fool enough to follow us into khaja lands. For that is what lies
